Lost and found at the gallery

Bendigo Weekly | Bendigo Weekly | 06-Dec-2011

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FOR an art historian, discovering someone who has been overlooked is just about the best thing that can happen.

When Harriet Edquist began researching the career of textile artist Michael O’Connell, she gradually grew convinced that here was such an artist.

At the end of a search that took her to London and Hertfordshire, the director of the design archives at RMIT University not only had a comprehensive record of O’Connell’s work, but also the makings of a new theory about art in Melbourne in the 1920s and 1930s.

“I am trying to show that Melbourne was alive to modernism in the 1920s,” Professor Edquist says.

“Everyone knows about modernism in Melbourne in the 1930s, but I came to see what an artisan like O’Connell had done.

“I really wanted to situate and think about craft as a modernist practice.”

That modernist practice will be on show from tomorrow at the Bendigo Art Gallery. “The Lost Modernist: Michael O’Connell”, curated by Prof. Edquist with the gallery’s senior curator, Tansy Curtin, the exhibition has fragments of textiles hand-dyed and printed in the artist’s Beaumaris studio during his 17-year stay in Melbourne.

It also includes work he produced at his Hertfordshire home, when he became much sought after as an innovator in both technique and style.

“At the end, he would talk about his reputation because people asked him why he wasn’t more famous,” Edquist says.

“There is some evidence that he felt depressed about being marginalised, but on the other hand, he had many people seeking his work and wanting to learn form him.

“Creative people only feel as good as their next piece; that’s their life, always on the margins.”

The Lost Modernist: Michael O’Connell at Bendigo Art Gallery runs until February 19.


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